Spam comments: On Friday we discovered that the anti-spam service which protects the blogs from comment spam was not working, but unfortunately too late to get it fixed by the weekend. This has led to a deluge of spam comments over the weekend. That is now fixed, spam levels should be minimal.

Smart YouTube and NextGen Gallery are amongst plugins which we have been advised to remove, for simplicity, security and performance reasons.

Smart YouTube was used by some schools to suppress display of related videos. This can now be achieved by using the Share / Embed Code option in YouTube, and unchecking the tick box “Show suggested videos when the video finishes.” The embed code is pasted into the editor Text view.

NextGen Gallery was popular for creating slideshows, but is a “sledgehammer to crack a nut”. A simpler way is to activate the Photo Galleria plugin, and use the built-in WordPress Gallery.

Embedded Google Calendars are displaying a message to the effect that there is no such Google Apps for education domain. This is because the embed code has been modified to refer to www.edubuzz.org, not edubuzz.org, and this needs undone. Please contact support@edubuzz.org if you’re affected, and not confident about fixing it yourself.

Passwords now require to be 10 characters long. Some people are encountering login difficulties, and this may be due to insufficiently complex passwords – we don’t yet know. In every case, using the “Forgot your password?” link (underneath the login box) to set a new password has got things back to normal.